Are you able to imagine a manufacturing company that would not use some kind of software? I definitely don’t. Many information systems enable more efficient management of the production process and monitoring of individual processes in the company. I am also convinced that all the automation of production and data collection is of no use if we don’t know how to properly use the possibilities of technological solutions. Therefore, I invite you to reflect on how manufacturing companies can better manage software – so that it brings results.
In a whole sea of information systems, the overarching system is ERP. For manufacturing companies, of course, the MES system, which is responsible for what happens in production, is also insanely important.
Remember that in order for such IT systems to pass the test, you need to have a vision of the end, of what will be in a while. If a manufacturing company is growing, even though it now employs 200 people, in a few years it will probably already have five hundred or seven hundred employees. So when planning the implementation of an IT system, we should take this scale of growth into account.
Nonetheless, I believe that sometimes it is not worth scaling a certain solution, because implementing a system faster makes it earn its keep faster. And this, in turn, often makes the company grow at the right pace and scale, and as a result, it can afford to replace the system with a more advanced one.
And the lengthy deliberation over the scalability of the solution we buy makes these purchasing processes very often prolonged, and the company loses out in real terms by simply not having such a system.
When choosing an IT system for your company, try to strike a balance between tailor-made solutions (written from scratch based on some specification) and ready-made boxed systems that you just need to install.
In the case of manufacturing companies, the situation is complicated, because each company is characterized by one type of technology and not another, has different machines, different key data for customers or for maintaining quality. Therefore, at the stage of implementing MES-type systems, some kind of castomization must take place. However, I encourage you to look for the golden mean between customization and reliance on proven modules at the consulting and concept-building stage. Writing code from scratch always involves an investment of time, a lot of work, a certain amount of uncertainty, a lot of testing, while ready-made solutions, on the other hand, are based on the experience of all previous customers who have used them in their companies.
Using open source solutions has many advantages. The most important one is that they accelerate the whole process with ready-made developed and tested modules that can bekustomized for your specific needs. A lot also depends on what area of the company you want to implement the open source solution in. I don’t advocate implementing a “pure” solution – be it open source or a closed solution, but in favor of using open source as a foundation for further castomization, which is especially useful in areas such as ERP, where many processes are common to different companies. After all, the way invoices are managed, communication with banking systems for payment processing, CRM modules can be similar in any company.
In the case of an MES system, it is already different. The know-how of technological processes, people, machines is practically unique, and therefore it is more difficult to find an open source solution that would actually apply here.
If your company is planning a major standardization in the area of information systems, then at the appropriate stage you need to think about the issue of data sharing between systems (what should stay in the ERP system and what should stay in the MES system or other accompanying solutions, such as laboratory systems, quality control or maintenance systems). In other words, you need to consider what the role of these different systems should be when implementing MES.
In addition, you need to consider the degree of detail in the data contained in these various systems, and – moreover – how these systems will exchange data with each other. We can imagine a situation in which only the ERP system will be responsible for collecting certain information (e.g., how much of a given product was produced on a given machine in response to a specific production order). The MES system, on the other hand, will cover so-called work-in-progress, and will be used to collect data from production. What does this look like in practice? The system gives us insight into any machine, and therefore access to information about what is happening at a given stage – now or in the past, so we can go to a much higher level of detail.
Data standardization is crucial to avoid excessive castomization and to facilitate diagnostics. Standardization of data transfer between different systems can be facilitated by intermediary layers, such as OPC.
Their job is to pull data from various automated systems and then name the relevant variables in a standard way, structuring them. In this way, the information system, no matter what machine it is dealing with, reads this data in exactly the same standard form.
I would like to emphasize once again how important it is to standardize data. Believe me, it’s better to take a step back sometimes and think some things through better so as not to shoot yourself in the knee. It doesn’t make sense to do castomization, to adapt the system under current procedures, drivers or data sources. Why? Because it’s very difficult to maintain and to diagnose, it’s inefficient, it’s expensive, and it’s also difficult to implement newcomers into heavily scastomized solutions. It’s better to rely on standard solutions that will simply speed us to the information we need. This approach will make it easier for you to potentially implement artificial intelligence, which is also much easier to build predictive systems from standard databases.
As you can see, proper management of information systems in manufacturing companies is the key to efficiency and growth. ERP and MES systems are the foundations that allow for smooth operation and process monitoring. It is worth keeping in mind the flexibility and scalability of the systems to meet future challenges.
Also keep in mind standardization and the balance between castomization and off-the-shelf solutions – the less complication, the greater the ease of management and innovation. Thoughtful implementations will allow companies to gain not only in time, but also in competitiveness – isn’t that an attractive prospect?
Do you have questions related to the management of IT systems in your enterprise? Feel free to contact us.
